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The Moon Approaching Saturn (Sept 17, 2024).jpg
The Moon a half a day before Full is about to pass in front of Saturn, hiding it, in the occultation of September 17, 2024.
This was from home in southern Alberta, with the Moon only 9° above the southwest horizon setting before dawn. This was at about 5:12 am MDT. Ingress was 1 minute later. But I missed it! (See below.)
I processed the lunar disk for contrast to bring out the differences in the tones and colours of the lunar mare, and the bright rays such as from Tycho at bottom. With Saturn, while the rings are visible, and nearly edge on at this time, there's no detail on the planet. It was too low and my gear and techniques not up to the task of resolving fine detail on a planet. But at least you can tell it's Saturn! And it is distinctly different in colour from the Moon.
Technical:
This is a blend of two sets of exposures to accommodate the range in brightness between the nearly Full Moon and Saturn:
- just a single 1/40-second exposure for the Moon, taken immediately after ...
- a stack of seven 1/8-second exposures for Saturn, average blended to smooth out the rippling effects of seeing conditions.
All with the Canon R5 at ISO 100 on the Askar APO 120 refractor at its f/7 focal ratio, so a focal length of 840mm. It was on the Sky-Watcher EQM-35 mount. The image is cropped in quite a bit from the original and re-sized to reduce pixelization. But the relative size of Saturn and the Moon have been retained and are accurate — I didn't magnify the disk of Saturn.
I shot an 8K movie of the actual ingress/disappearance — or attempted to! — but by the time I got the camera going in movie mode (I thought taking only a few seconds) Saturn had already disappeared. It was closer to the Moon than I thought as there was a dark limb here that hid Saturn and made it hard to tell how far Saturn was from the lunar limb. Lunar occultations of planets are rare enough I don't have much experience shooting them. And I am not a planetary imager!
This was from home in southern Alberta, with the Moon only 9° above the southwest horizon setting before dawn. This was at about 5:12 am MDT. Ingress was 1 minute later. But I missed it! (See below.)
I processed the lunar disk for contrast to bring out the differences in the tones and colours of the lunar mare, and the bright rays such as from Tycho at bottom. With Saturn, while the rings are visible, and nearly edge on at this time, there's no detail on the planet. It was too low and my gear and techniques not up to the task of resolving fine detail on a planet. But at least you can tell it's Saturn! And it is distinctly different in colour from the Moon.
Technical:
This is a blend of two sets of exposures to accommodate the range in brightness between the nearly Full Moon and Saturn:
- just a single 1/40-second exposure for the Moon, taken immediately after ...
- a stack of seven 1/8-second exposures for Saturn, average blended to smooth out the rippling effects of seeing conditions.
All with the Canon R5 at ISO 100 on the Askar APO 120 refractor at its f/7 focal ratio, so a focal length of 840mm. It was on the Sky-Watcher EQM-35 mount. The image is cropped in quite a bit from the original and re-sized to reduce pixelization. But the relative size of Saturn and the Moon have been retained and are accurate — I didn't magnify the disk of Saturn.
I shot an 8K movie of the actual ingress/disappearance — or attempted to! — but by the time I got the camera going in movie mode (I thought taking only a few seconds) Saturn had already disappeared. It was closer to the Moon than I thought as there was a dark limb here that hid Saturn and made it hard to tell how far Saturn was from the lunar limb. Lunar occultations of planets are rare enough I don't have much experience shooting them. And I am not a planetary imager!
- Copyright
- © Alan Dyer/AmazingSky.com
- Image Size
- 6292x4196 / 4.9MB
- www.amazingsky.com
- Contained in galleries
- Moon & Sun, Conjunctions, My Latest
